Email is rapidly becoming the preferred form of communication for businesses, governments, and personal communications of individuals. As a result, a variety of tools have been provided by email systems to filter, customize, process, and present emails within the email systems in order to improve an end-user's experience and productivity within the email systems. Further, email systems have become collaborative with a variety of other applications that the end-user may use while accessing an email within the email systems. For example, emails are often integrated with calendar applications, word processing applications, image viewing applications, World Wide Web (WWW) browser applications, spreadsheet applications, database applications, and others.
Moreover, email systems typically are packaged with macro coding languages that permit the end-user to define rules that execute upon the receipt of an email to perform some processing against the received email. For example, rules can send a response to a sender of the received email indicating that the recipient of the email is unavailable, rules can forward the email to a second email address, and rules can automatically move the received email to end-user defined email folders.
Also, email systems present emails included within an end-user's email inbox in a variety of formats. Some formats can be configured based on the preferences of the end-user, and a number of the formats come predefined with the email system. For example, often emails presented within an end-user's email inbox are displayed in a summary format, where metadata information associated with each email is listed horizontally across a window for the end-user to easily view. Some of this metadata information can include an indication as to whether the email has any electronic attachments, an indication as to whether any priority is associated with the email, an indication as to a date the email was received, an indication of an email address that sent the email, and a textual description of a subject associated with the email.
However, even with the variety of applications and tools provided with conventional email systems, many end-users still find the ability to customize email communications according to their own individual preferences difficult. Also, many end-users find it difficult to globally customize email communications. For example, some end-users can receive large volumes of emails on any given day, and since it is difficult to customize the email communications the end-users become frustrated and often ignore email communications that are of importance to the end-users because of the end-users inability to rapidly and efficiently distinguish between the important emails and insignificant emails.
Furthermore, a single email can be communicated from and to a particular end-user on multiple occasions. For example, an end-user can originate an email and then later receive the same email back, such as when a recipient of the end-user's original email replies to the original email. As is readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art, the transfer of the original email from and to the end-user can potentially have an infinite number of iterations involving a plurality of recipients. In order for the end-user and each of the recipients of the email to efficiently process iterations of the transferred email, the end-user and the recipients need the capability to independently customize the way in which the end-user and each of the recipients prefer to identify and process the transferred email, or the ability to globally coordinate identification and processing of the transferred email.
One conventional technique permits customized categories to be assigned by conventional email systems for each recipient of the email. However, the customized categories are not consistently maintained with the email itself, and as a result when one recipient receives the same email transferred back from a sender, the recipient must manually identify the email and manually assign the same customized category to the email that the recipient original assigned to the email. This can be frustrating to the recipient, and defeats the purpose of being able to automatically assign a category to a single email with the assurance that the email system will maintain that association irrespective of the number of iterations that each recipient receives the email.
As is now apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art, conventional email systems do not permit a customized assignment of categories to an email, such that the categories can be tailored to each recipient of the email. Furthermore, conventional email systems do not maintain consistent categories with transferred iterations of a single email.
Therefore, there exists a need for improved techniques that customize category assignments for each recipient of an email. Moreover, there exists a need for techniques that maintain the customized category assignment for all transferred iterations of the email.